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How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.
Joyce Carol Oates
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Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
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More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.
Joyce Carol Oates
I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
Joyce Carol Oates
Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
Joyce Carol Oates
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
Joyce Carol Oates
The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.
Joyce Carol Oates
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
Joyce Carol Oates
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
Joyce Carol Oates
Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
Joyce Carol Oates
I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.
Joyce Carol Oates
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last nothing can guarantee it.
Joyce Carol Oates
When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.
Joyce Carol Oates
The quiet people just do their work.
Joyce Carol Oates
Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.
Joyce Carol Oates
I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
Joyce Carol Oates
A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.
Joyce Carol Oates
What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
Joyce Carol Oates
I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
Joyce Carol Oates
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of communication the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.
Joyce Carol Oates
